Lynn Steger Strong’s latest novel, The Float Test (Mariner Books, 2025), tells the story of four siblings coming together one Florida summer to grieve the death of their mother. Each sibling is navigating a cocktail of grievances and secrets that separate them from their loved ones when they need them the most, and they all want to know why their mother had a gun in her underwear drawer.
The concerns of The Float Test run much deeper, however. The power to control a narrative normally belongs to the storyteller—the one orchestrating where the reader looks, what information is given, and to whose advantage. Instead, Strong subverts this authority by putting the writer on the receiving end of the gaze. Jude, a recovering New York lawyer, tells the story of the Kenner family with a firm eye on her once-favorite sister, Fred, a novelist, with whom she has fallen out. In doing so, Strong asks vital questions about what a fiction writer owes, if anything, to the people whose secrets she exploits.
Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Flight, Want, and Hold Still. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, the Paris Review, The Cut, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Princeton and Columbia.
Strong and I spoke over Zoom, where we discussed the complexities of storytelling, the trickiness of conveying time in fiction, and what inspires her revision process. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Rumpus: What inspired this novel? What were the big questions or obsessions you were working through as you wrote it?
Lynn Steger Strong: I’m really interested in the concept of storytelling. I’ve always been interested in how the stories we tell about ourselves and one another do active and unforeseen violence to each other. This is me coming at this from another angle. The gun is partially storytelling. I taught a class on domestic fiction, and we talked about this idea that the storyteller at the beginning of the novel always seems like the least powerful person. It also makes sense because writers don’t tend to feel powerful in their actual lives, but the person who tells the story has the most power, right? So, it’s a different type of power. So, in my mind, the gun is partially the concept of storytelling: to give that power to the person who’s felt powerless in the act of storytelling was really interesting to me.
I think imagining is an act of love. Jude is, on one hand, telling Fred’s story in a not-so-secret hope to find a way to love Fred by the end. I also think Jude is—in telling Fred’s story—working through all her own shit.
Rumpus: Did you always know Jude was going to be the storyteller? Did you try writing this from Fred’s point of view?
Strong: Yeah, I always knew. I wanted to sort of disempower Fred in the space of telling the story of the storyteller from a different angle. I was interested in coming at Fred from the point-of-view of someone who doesn’t trust her [and] is wary of liking her, and [to see] what that might open us up to in a way that’s different.
Rumpus: There are a lot of characters in The Float Test who have complicated politics but remain very sympathetic to the reader. What were you thinking about as you created these characters?
Strong: We sort of intellectually agree that no human being is explicitly good or explicitly bad, and asking a character to be relatable all of the time negates the possibility of their being a fully realized human. I think art is inherently political, but I also think that if you are trying to argue your politics in your fiction, you are doing fiction wrong.
One of the main things I learned, formally, with Want is how to play the victim–perpetrator game. If there ever was a scene where [the narrator] felt a little too much of a victim, in the next scene she had to be a perpetrator. I was constantly playing that game of, “If George has agency in one scene, I need to make clear that there are the spaces where he doesn’t have agency because, of course, none of us has agency all of the time. I think it’s really useful when writing fiction to read the book as if you’re on each character’s team.
Rumpus: I’ve heard you refer to this as your Florida book. Why Florida, and why now?
Strong: During Covid, we went down to Florida. My family and I lived in Florida for six months. I grew up there, my husband grew up there, and every day I was there, I thought, “I have never written anything really true because I’ve never written anything as fucked up as this place.” I mean it in both directions, right? I couldn’t figure out how to digest the beauty. One thing that feels really important to me is that every feeling holds its opposite inside it too. Because I feel such intense love for the place, of course, I also feel anger for all the ways I see it being destroyed and grief for the fact that I can’t raise my kids there, or I’m not going to raise my kids there. And so, it felt like the exact right place to try to hold deeply disparate and dissonant ideas in your head and in a novel.
Rumpus: It feels incredibly timely because you’ve written a book about a place that we don’t know how much longer is going to exist in the form that it exists in now.
Strong: We’re all living in this strange, I think, miasmic state of anticipatory grief. We know loss is coming, but sometimes it’s hard to touch and feel that loss. In Florida, it’s different because it’s closer and it’s more present. Like the beach that I grew up going to as a kid, we couldn’t take our kids to because it has eroded away so many times. In Florida, this loss is happening right now.
Rumpus: Do you want to talk a little bit about your intention with the vultures in your book? What do they symbolize?
Strong: When we were living in Florida I would sit outside after the kids were in bed and look up at the sky. There were tons and tons of vultures. The word “vulture” has very specific connotations. Obviously, I’m interested in words and their connotations. I mentioned to my mother-in-law, “There’s so many vultures, it’s strangely ominous.” She said, “It’s not ominous. It’s sad. They’re dying.” I was like, “Oh, fuck.” The idea that I think an image is one thing but actually turns out to be another thing is so much of what I’m interested in in fiction. And especially that I thought they were a threat but actually humans were threatening them. She was just like, “No, they’re so hungry. They form these swarms and are swarming around looking for any scraps of food, and they can’t find it.”
Rumpus: Is that why you had Fred give them the steak?
Strong: Yes, because they’re hungry. A few weeks before I turned the book in, I was reading the [William] Faulkner Paris Review interview. He [said] when he died that he wanted to come back as a buzzard, another name for vulture. It was one of those magic moments because this is an animal that holds multiple conflicting ideas inside, all of which I’m interested in: danger, precarity, scarcity, lack. It’s actually reframed the vultures for me. I think one thing that Fred is interested in—one of the ways that I am very different from Fred—is a life free of attachments, which is partially what Faulkner was saying he wanted. Fred’s obsessed with [vultures] because the only thing she thinks they need is food. They don’t need community or other people, but I think we need those things.
Rumpus: What responsibility do we have to people we’re in community with, when that community makes really good material for our art?
Strong: This conversation is so tricky. On one hand, I want to reject it full bore and just say, “Language is not life.” But I’ve been a writer a long time, and I have seen people I love feel recognized in my fiction. I’ve seen when it doesn’t feel good to them. That matters to me.
When I’m inside of fiction, I am obsessed with that fiction in a way that feels completely insane. I will pull at anything I can that will make that fiction good, even in moments when I’ve had to answer for that. There is something important to me about nosing my way to what feels to me like a visceral truth. I like my relationships—my family, my friendships are incredibly important to me. I don’t want to be a buzzard, I want to be a person. I want to be a person with community. That matters a lot to me.
When I wrote Flight, there were things that I pulled closer to my husband’s family, and his family is a family that I deeply love. When my husband’s mom read it, I asked her about that. She’s a woman I really, really love. She said, “Everything you built inside that book, you built it with love.”
Again, I don’t know if this is morally acceptable, but the peace I made with this book was: “I’m going to be as hard and as sharp and as prickly and as angry as I need to be to burrow into the spaces that I want to burrow into . . . but I’m going to do it with love.”
Rumpus: Did you show it to your family?
Strong: Yeah. My mom read it. This is something I’m trying to make my peace with. She called me, crying, and she was pretty upset halfway in, but then she got to the end. The woman [in The Float Test] is not my mom, but I was interested in the same things that are hard about having a mom who’s tough, you know. And she called me at the end, she was crying, and she [said], “I get it, I love you.” This is not a place we’ve been a lot in our lives. On my best days, [I think] there’s no more that this book could accomplish, if it’s our job to try to communicate what feels impossible to communicate. We have really struggled to communicate for forty-one years, and she got it. That felt really good.
Rumpus: So the book took something, but it also gave something back to you?
Strong: I don’t believe in a book as catharsis or therapy or any of those things, but I do think, especially with my last two books—this sounds really corny, but it feels true—they taught me to love better.
We are so wrong so often about people, right? And there’s something so charming and exciting and hopeful to me about being reminded of how little I know about human beings and how much I might still be able to discover about human beings. I think that’s one of the most fun things about writing books. I really believe in continuing to think about, how else is this character wrong about these people? Or how else am I, as a writer, not thinking about how I might be wrong about these people or these ideas?
Rumpus: It’s notable that both of your recent novels begin with the death of a mother. Why are you interested in this?
Strong: Because moms keep people safe. When people lose their mom, it’s like they’re out in the wild. I’m interested in how death opens our imaginations up to reconsider people in more complicated and layered ways that aren’t interrupted by the living person coming in to contradict our thinking. I’m interested, actually, in the presence of the absence, which is [Virginia] Woolf. [It] opens you up to be more fluid in your thinking about who a person is or who a person was. Which is actually kind of the opposite of grief.
Rumpus: You’ve said before that writing a shorter, compressed novel felt just as ambitious as a kind of sprawling, maximalist book. The Float Test is exemplary for this ambition. Can you talk about what revision looked like for you and how you go about the process of this distillation? How did you come to your approach to backstory?
Strong: A thousand years ago, my husband and I used to drive up and down the I-95 corridor for his job. I was applying to grad school, and I would read to him my stories, and he would just tell me when he was bored, and he would get bored really quickly. I would [say], “Okay, I’ve got to cut.” It was physically uncomfortable because we’re sitting in this truck, towing a bunch of boats, and I’m reading these stories to him. He would say, “No, I’m bored, I’m bored.” To some extent, my body always remembers that, in later drafts. I don’t want people to be bored.
I also think if I believe we hold multiple iterations of time inside of our body, in any single moment, how do I convey that in fiction without the reader losing hold of the present action? I have to go back quickly. I don’t want the reader to experience a flashback as a fully realized, lush, sensuous scene that they’re immersed in such that when we return to the present action, they’re like, “Oh, right, we’re at a pool.” I want a reader to experience it much more closely to how I experience it in my body, when I’m in a place where I grew up, like I’m standing there and I’m talking, and then I dip in and I dip out [of the past]. So part of it is just a fictional version of verisimilitude of consciousness.
The Rumpus: What books do you see as literary ancestors to The Float Test?Which ones were important to you while you wrote this?
Strong: This is embarrassing, because it’s one of the most perfect books of the twentieth century, but structurally in To the Lighthouse, at the beginning, they try to go to the lighthouse, but they don’t go. And at the end of To the Lighthouse, they go to the lighthouse. At the beginning of The Float Test, they try to go to the beach but don’t go. At the end of The Float Test, they go to the beach. That is just me being like, “Hi, Virginia, I love you.”
A couple of summers ago, when I was first starting this book, my friend and I—we have a sort of never-ending book club—read all of [Karl Ove Knausgaard’s] My Struggle books together. I just kept calling [my friend] and saying, “Time is everything. Every novel is about time. I was thinking about [those books] so much, in terms of their willingness to say, “No, we are never wholly in one moment. We are always in seven moments.”
The Black Prince, by Iris Murdoch, was also important to me.
The Rumpus: Your work, along with other female writers who write in a similar vein, has been criticized for considering “a white women’s existential malaise in the face of social ills.” Fred’s climate anxiety is a major motif in The Flow Test, and it feels incredibly honest. How did you decide to double down on anxiety or malaise?
Strong: If you do this long enough, [you know] you can’t write toward your worst critics. You have to write toward the people who maybe really need to see and feel and hear the things that you’re trying to show and say. I do think there is a particular register of being a woman that makes a certain type of man profoundly uncomfortable and angry for reasons he doesn’t even have language for.
The reason that [certain criticism] is upsetting to me is because it feels profoundly familiar and foundational to my experience of being a woman. If a certain type of woman stands up and speaks in a certain type of way, people have a visceral desire to slap her back down and tell her to sit down and shut up. I think what feels different about some of the responses to my books is that it doesn’t feel like criticism. It feels like someone needing to slap me down, telling me to shut up, and I’m not going to do that.
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Author photograph by Nina Subin
